Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  But if there was a strong erotic current in all these friendships, it is uncertain how many of them actually resulted in sexual relations. The wonderfully good-looking Bernard Berenson, in later life, boasted that Wilde had made a pass at him; but he had resisted, drawing the retort that he must be ‘completely without feeling’ and ‘made of stone’.43 The rebuff, however, did nothing to break his growing friendship with Wilde. Harry Melvill, it seems, was more compliant. Wilde would later refer to having ‘had’ him.44 W. Graham Robertson claimed that Wilde ‘never once revealed’ any sexual interest in him, and supposed he had been ‘protected’ by his own rather fastidious ‘purity’ of character.45

  ‘Dear Sandy’ Raffalovich was less pure and less protected. He was fascinated by the subject of same-sex desire. Several of his poems touched on it; he had even published an ode to ‘Piers Gaveston’, the lover of Edward II. ‘You could give me a new thrill,’ Wilde told him. ‘You have the right measure of romance and cynicism.’ The thrill was more likely to have been intellectual than physical; for, although Raffalovich’s sexual instincts were directed towards men, he seems to have sublimated them into spiritual yearning and intellectual curiosity.46 His eagerness for knowledge was stimulating. Certainly Wilde relished their long talks about ‘the more dangerous affections’. (The nomenclature – and the classification – of same-sex desire remained unfixed and debated: ‘inversion’, ‘uranisim’, ‘unisexualité’, and ‘Greek love’ were some of the terms employed by its devotees. ‘Sodomy’ was preferred by its detractors. J. A. Symonds, in his privately printed pamphlet of 1883, A Problem of Greek Ethics, had called it ‘homosexual passion’.) No topics were taboo. Wilde gave over several happy hours to describing the bizarre details of Monsieur Venus, a determinedly decadent French novel in which a bored noblewoman (Raoul de Vénérande) seduces and corrupts a young man; having schemed to have him killed in a duel, she then continues her predatory sexual relationship with his embalmed and partly mechanized corpse. Incest was touched on. But it was to des Esseintes’ relationship with the mysterious young man who had picked him up in the street that Wilde returned most often.47

  All these friendships contributed, in their different ways, to Wilde’s growing engagement with homosexual desire and homosexual sex. But they found their place within the framework of his domestic life. The young men were invited to Tite Street and introduced to Constance; some became her friends. Robbie Ross came to stay with the Wildes for two months in 1887 (while his mother was travelling), and although the arrangement almost certainly allowed for more sex with Oscar, it also initiated a happy and enduring friendship with Constance.48

  For Wilde family life still retained many attractions. The physical side of the relationship with Constance certainly altered and may have terminated, but he continued, for the moment, to share with his wife all the old interests, affections, ambitions and anxieties. Indeed the enduring strength and happiness of the Wildes’ marriage was brought into sharper focus during the summer of 1887 when Constance’s brother, Otho, deserted his own young wife and two small children, and ran off with another woman.49 The Wildes’ own boys stood large in Oscar’s thoughts, and he was distraught when Vyvyan fell dangerously ill.50

  Beyond the family circle Wilde’s social life was still dominated by the broader currents of fashionable London existence: private views and first nights, receptions and dinner parties, if not dances (as Wilde confessed to Graham Robertson, ‘I am not sure whether we are too old or too young, but [my wife and I] never tread any measures now’).51 Sundays would always see him in Mrs Jeune’s crowded drawing room. ‘There are’, he declared, ‘three inevitables: death, quarter-day and Mrs Jeune’s parties’.52 He and Constance began to hold receptions of their own. The first, a crowded party on the afternoon of 1 July 1886, gathered a notably ‘modern’ company of actors, writers and relatives.53 And from this developed the tradition of regular Tite Street ‘at homes’ on the first and third Thursday of each month (later changed to Wednesday).54

  It was a stage on which Wilde loved to tread. His eloquence, honed by four years of lecturing, had grown even more assured. His wit – and his sense of joy – were undimmed; his pose as distinctive as ever. One contemporary has left a vivid sketch of his physical manner:

  When standing and talking – [he] bent the head forward condescendingly to his listener (a trick inherited from his mother), was easily audible in any drawing-room through the buzz of conversation and filled and permeated a room with his presence… Attitude when seated and talking – Leant forward from his waist towards his listener; fixed his eyes full upon him; made much play with his right arm and hand, moving the arm freely from the shoulder, and letting the large hand with its full and fleshy palm move freely on the wrist. When he made a point… would throw himself back in the chair and look at his auditor as much as to say: ‘What can you find to say to that?’55

  The overall effect was that ‘he might have stepped out of the Seventeenth Century or ‘an aristocratic “salon” of the reign of Louis Quinze’.56

  Conscious of his own gifts, Wilde was always ready to give place to others. He never monopolized the conversation. As another friend put it, he simply ‘took the ball of talk wherever it happened to be at the moment and played with it so humorously that everyone was soon smiling delightedly… No subject came amiss to him; he saw everything from a humorous angle and dazzled one now with word wit, now with the very stuff of merriment.’57 His laugh provided the punctuation: ‘He would wait to see if you had caught his point, and suddenly burst into a peal of laughter of exquisite enjoyment at his own witticism or joke.’58

  The young American author Edgar Saltus was rather disconcerted by the ‘serenity’ with which Wilde ‘waded’ in wit.59 But most simply enjoyed it, carried along by the ‘impressive levity’ that was perhaps Wilde’s great quality as a talker.60 He retained all his old social tact and positive outlook, preferring to praise rather than to disparage. Dislike and disapproval were only ever hinted at.61 He undercut his own brilliance with frequent notes of self-deprecation. Mary Costelloe, the young woman with whom Bernard Berenson was in love, recounted how Wilde, having met her ‘five nights in succession’, announced, ‘Now you have exhausted my repertory. I had only five subjects of conversation prepared and have run out. I shall have to give you one of the former ones. Which would you like?’ (they settled on ‘evolution’).62 But these were private performances, and the more private the jollier. Friends noted that, in his own home, his sense of humour (as distinct from his wit) became even more ebullient and contagious.63

  In the public landscape Wilde’s wit counted for less. It was generally noted that Oscar’s star had been sinking gradually lower ‘on the horizon since he cut his hair and became “Benedick the married man”’.64 He seemed to have transformed, by degrees, into a complacent ‘bourgeois’. His dress was now conventional – if always slightly too smart. He had grown plump. His new sexual interests remained unknown and unguessed. And although he might, occasionally, be mentioned in the press, the comments were fleeting.§ As Edgar Saltus noted, ‘He had been caricatured: the caricatures had ceased. People had turned to look: they looked no longer.’ He was ‘not only forgiven – but forgotten’.65 In the five years since his return from America he had produced nothing of note and – despite a steady trickle of articles – seemed given over to ‘the dolce far niente’.66

  Although Wilde, beneath the plush exterior, retained his artistic ambitions, they vied with social ones. And on that score, at least, there were some gratifying marks of advance. He was seeing a great deal of his old friend Carlos Blacker, and through him had come to know ‘Linny’, the young Duke of Newcastle, as well as the duke’s spendthrift younger brother, Lord Francis Hope. This connection secured the Wildes an occasional invitation to the ducal home at Clumber in Nottinghamshire.67 For Oscar the visits marked an exciting new peak in his social climbing. They enormously gratified his romantic snobbery. Indeed the very name ‘Clumber’ seems to
have had an actual magic for him. He introduced it whenever possible into his correspondence and his conversation, as confirmation of his new standing.68

  Being among titled people stimulated Wilde’s creative energies: he strove ‘to surpass himself’ in such company. After one of his visits to Clumber he missed his train, and was brought back to the house to wait for the next one. Having exhausted himself in his efforts to impress, he was, in his own recollection, an ‘extinct volcano’: he could no longer talk at all, he was ‘played out’, his powers of performance over.69 There was, though, a virtue in all his chatter. It was through conversation that Wilde formed his ideas and mapped out his plans. ‘Everything came to him in the excitement of talk,’ recalled a contemporary; ‘epigrams, paradoxes and stories.’70 And it was storytelling that was playing an increasingly large part in his discourse.

  From the time of his Cambridge visit to Harry Marillier he was, it seems almost constantly spinning tales. Towards the end of any social occasion, when the company shrank or the talk became general, he might make a start. Stories flowed from him: fantastical, historical, romantic, macabre, biblical – always alive with paradoxical humour, and often touched by unexpected profundity. These performances, according to one rapt listener, were ‘so natural’ that Wilde seemed to be speaking almost for his own benefit, yet so graceful that his audience had ‘the flattering illusion’ that they had indeed merited the ‘expense of imagination and energy’.71 No story, moreover, was ever fixed. Its details would be endlessly elaborated and refined, guyed with alternative endings, new jokes, and different emotional moods.

  Having made a start with ‘The Happy Prince’, he had, though, been slow to commit himself again to paper, or to investigate the possibilities of print. His mother had been urging him towards fiction for some time. ‘Suppose you lay the plot of your story… on the Isle of Wight,’ she had suggested. ‘Begin: the first sentence is everything.’72 And gradually he came to accept the wisdom of her words. A short story, after all, might count as part of the ‘more lasting work’ that he so wanted to produce. And, in a market where almost every periodical regularly published short fiction, a story would be far easier to sell than a play. But, even so, he proceeded with caution. As a first step he sought to bolster his own position through association. Just as his first published poem had been a translation, so was his first published fiction – a short story by Turgenev, done from the French. He sent it to his old friend George Macmillan who, although initially doubtful of its appeal, did find a place for it in the May 1886 number of Macmillan’s Magazine. It was a very modest debut, since Wilde was not even credited as the translator.73

  Nevertheless it was something. And seeking to capitalize upon the achievement he sent off ‘The Happy Prince’ to another Macmillan periodical, the English Illustrated Magazine. The editor, Joe Comyns Carr, seems to have encouraged his hopes, and even commissioned from him a further piece – a humorous non-fiction essay on artists’ models. Wilde delivered the article promptly. But then a dismaying silence fell. Both manuscripts were left languishing in the editor’s drawer.74 Wilde, though, clearly believed that there should be a market for his fairy stories. He wrote up another one – ‘The Selfish Giant’ – which he showed to Laura Troubridge, in the hope that she might provide illustrations for it. But if he thought that pictures would be an additional inducement to a magazine editor, the ploy was not successful.75

  Wilde finally achieved his breakthrough as a fiction writer not in a Macmillan-backed periodical, and not with a fairy tale. ‘The Canterville Ghost’, a humorous story of the supernatural, was published – with illustrations – in two numbers of the Court and Society Review at the beginning of 1887. The paper was a sympathetic one, a sophisticated (and short-lived) weekly that, under its editor Charles Gray Robertson and his young Balliol-educated assistant, Alsager Vian, covered such important topics as French ‘Décadence’, contemporary opera, Godwin’s theatrical productions, and ‘ladies of the aristocracy’. Not only Oscar but also Constance and Lady Wilde were mentioned regularly in its social columns.76 Robertson was delighted to add Wilde to his list of contributors.

  Wilde’s ghost story comically inverted the established tropes of the genre. The unfortunate ghost is terrorized by the boisterously philistine and materialist American family that takes a lease on the old English country house that is his home – before, in a romantically sentimental conclusion, he achieves a blessed release through the kindness of the family’s teenage daughter. The American element in the story allowed Wilde to reuse and refine some of his transatlantic witticisms, such as the English having ‘really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language’. He even had the Ghost respond to a suggestion that he would not like America ‘because we have no ruins and no curiosities’, with the exclamation, ‘No ruins! No curiosities! You have your navy and your manners.’¶Although the Ghost might have not liked America, Wilde suspected that America would like the Ghost. He dispatched a copy of the typescript to Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune, and the paper published the ‘brilliant Anglo-American story’ in their Sunday edition.77

  Wilde hoped that the Court and Society Review would follow up the success of ‘The Canterville Ghost’ by publishing ‘a short fairy tale’ (perhaps ‘The Selfish Giant’).78 But it seems that they wanted something more adult, more contemporary, more amusing, and perhaps more mysterious too. So Wilde set about writing up another of the stories he had been rehearsing over the previous months: the tale of the amiable young Lord Arthur Savile, who is told by a palmist that he is ineluctably fated to kill someone – and sets about trying fulfil his doom in the least offensive manner possible. In one brisk version Wilde recounted how Lord Arthur ‘sent some poison by post to an uncle who had been ill for a long time, whose murder would be an act of humanity, and from whose will he expected to benefit. But what is one person’s poison is another’s cure, and a fortnight later his uncle gave a dinner party to celebrate his return to health.’ Other well-meaning attempts are similarly foiled. Then: ‘One night [Lord Arthur] was walking along the Thames Embankment in despair, and wondering whether suicide would count as murder, when he saw someone leaning over the parapet. No one was in sight, and the river was in flood. It was a heaven-sent-opportunity, the answer to his prayer. Leaning down quickly, he seized the unknown’s legs; there was a splash in the dark swirling waters, and peace descended upon Lord Arthur. His duty done, he slept well.’ Only on the following afternoon did he see in the paper a notice headed, ‘Well-known Palmist drowned – Suicide of Mr. Ransom.’ Lord Arthur sent to the funeral a wreath inscribed with the words, ‘In Gratitude’.

  Wilde spun numerous variations of the story, elaborating it with ‘exquisite humour and fancy’. And although he might sometimes try to convince his listeners that he would not be publishing the tale – ‘it’s such a bore writing these things out’ – no one was deceived.79 ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ was duly published in the Court and Society Review, in three parts, in May 1887 (again with illustrations by the young artist F. H. Townsend). Although those who had heard the story might claim that Wilde’s extemporized oral renditions had been far superior, there was still much to enjoy in the well-turned prose and crystallized wit of the print version. Lady Wilde wrote enthusiastically, calling the story ‘most brilliant and attractive’. She thought the ‘mystery’ of the plot ‘thrilling’, and went on: ‘All your epigrammatic style tells in this kind of work. You could be the Disraeli of fiction if you choose. And all your social knowledge comes in so well, especially your women.’80

  Her verdict was very just. The story, even more than its predecessor, sounded a distinct and personal note – in the romantic glamour of its aristocratic settings (it opens at ‘Lady Windermere’s last reception before Easter’), in the romantic unreality of its emotions, the playful absurdity of its plot, and the profligate scattering of its paradox. Wilde’s own voice was clearly heard in such epigrams as: ‘He had that rarest o
f all things, common sense’; ‘Not being a genius, he had no enemies’; ‘She had that inordinate passion for pleasure that is the secret of remaining young’; and ‘Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion’.

  Wilde continued his happy connection with the Court and Society Review until shortly before its demise the following year, contributing occasional unsigned essays and reviews – and even a sonnet, just to remind the public that he was still a poet.81 But his next two short stories were published in the World, which offered a higher profile and a wider readership. ‘Lady Alroy’ and ‘The Model Millionaire’ kept up the neat inversions, worldly comic tone and epigrammatic sparkle of the earlier pieces – while the second story (about a millionaire who poses for artists dressed as a beggar) also allowed him to redeploy some of the observations from his article about models that was still languishing in the manuscript chest at the English Illustrated Magazine.

  It was pleasing to see his name regularly in print again. Bowered in his vermilion study, he could feel like a writer. Expanding into the role, he started to map out ‘a story connected with Shakespeare’s sonnets’, as well as continuing to push his fairy tales.82 Although he failed to find takers for them, he wrote up several more: ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ (a poetical tale of love and self-sacrifice); ‘The Devoted Friend’ (a brutally comic story of exploitation); and ‘The Remarkable Rocket’, in which the supremely self-important firework of the title perhaps satirized the delusional vanity of Whistler. ‘You should be thinking about others,’ the Rocket informs a humble fire-cracker, at one moment, ‘In fact you should be thinking about me. I am always thinking about myself, and I expect everybody else to do the same. That is what is called sympathy. It is a beautiful virtue, and I possess it in high degree.’